After Two Decades, California Restores Bilingual Education : NPR Ed : NPR

After Two Decades, California Restores Bilingual Education : NPR Ed : NPR:

Bilingual Education Returns To California. Now What?

Voters in California officially ended the era of English-only instruction in public schools and lifted restrictions on bilingual education that had been in place for 18 years. Proposition 58 passed by a 73-27 percent margin. What happens next though, could get complicated.

Classrooms won't change this school year because the measure doesn't kick in until July 2017. Until then, state and school district officials need to figure out three big things:

1. How many schools will actually begin to offer bilingual or dual language instruction?

State Senator Ricardo Lara, a Democrat from the Los Angeles area and the main sponsor of Proposition 58, says the new law does not mandate bilingual education.

Katie Falkenberg/LA Times via Getty Images

2. Will it cost more for schools to have this offering?

3. Where will schools find the bilingual teachers they need?

This third question is perhaps the most important question. A teacher shortage is a very real possibility because during the 18 year restrictions on bilingual education, most certified bilingual teachers left the state.

State senator Ricardo Lara, a Democrat from the Los Angeles area and the main sponsor of Proposition 58, says the new law does not mandate bilingual education. So it is way too early to know how many schools will offer new programs or how many certified bilingual teachers will be needed.

English-only programs will continue to be an alternative pathway for English language learners to become proficient in English.

But it'll be up to school districts to decide locally whether they want to offer bilingual education or not, based on parents' demand for it. Under the new measure, if at least 20-30 parents want bilingual instruction for their children, their school will have to provide it. Even if only a few parents want it — less than 20 — that could put pressure on schools to make and force school district officials to intervene and come up with an accommodation.

The main change under Proposition 58 is that parents no longer have to sign a waiver in order to enroll their children in a dual language or bilingual classroom. Under English-only policies, teachers were prohibited from making any recommendation on bilingual education, so that could change too.

Overall, it'll be easier now for the California's 1.4 million English language learners — about a fifth of the states' total student enrollment — to enroll in bilingual classes in which kids are taught in their native language and gradually make the transition to English. They would also have the option of enrolling in dual-language programs in which students are taught all their courses in two languages at the same time.

The demand for dual language immersion programs has in fact seen a dramatic increase in California in the last few years, especially among affluent Anglo parents who see bilingualism as academic enrichment.

As for the cost, sponsors of Proposition 58 say that based on their financial analysis, restoring bilingual ed won't cost the state more money. Instead, local districts will have full discretion to shift the money they already have to pay for new programs.

Finally, let's not forget that California has been under lots of scrutiny because of its shortcomings in educating ELLs under English-only policies. In 2015 the U.S. Justice Department found that California had failed to address the high failure rates of tens of thousands of ELLs. As a result, state education officials agreed to new training and monitoring procedures to ensure that districts provide the necessary services and interventions required under the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act.

To that end, bilingual education and dual language instruction will now become part of the mix of instructional options educators will have to appease parents and improve the quality of instruction ELLs receive on their way to English proficiency.After Two Decades, California Restores Bilingual Education : NPR Ed : NPR:

Mother Crusader: Betsy DeVos: Conflict of Interest Concerns Arise on Future Secretary's Twitter Account

Mother Crusader: Betsy DeVos: Conflict of Interest Concerns Arise on Future Secretary's Twitter Account:

Betsy DeVos: Conflict of Interest Concerns Arise on Future Secretary's Twitter Account

So it's done.

Trump has appointed billionaire school choice fetishist Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education.

"Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate,” Trump said in a statement. “Under her leadership we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families."

When I first heard the news I took to Twitter to check out her account. Here's the first thing I noticed. 

 Follow

Betsy DeVos @BetsyDeVos

I am honored to work with the President-elect on his vision to make American education great again. The status quo in ed is not acceptable.

10:14 AM - 23 Nov 2016

 
•  3,9443,944 Retweets
 
•  7,1217,121 likes

Let's play a little game for a moment to try and lighten the mood. Did you catch the missing word in that tweet? The missing word is public. Our new Secretary of Education can't bring herself to utter the word public in the same sentence as education while announcing that she will soon oversee the education of 50 million American students in public schools.

Here's what I noticed next. Her header photo.

At  first glance this just looks like a lovely photo of DeVos in conversation with a student. But huh, isn't it a little odd that there is a carton in front of each of them? And not just any carton, a carton of water. That's not something you see everyday.

It looks like a product placement, doesn't it? But nah, she's savvy enough to keep any products her family business may be associated with far away from the Twitter account where she's tweeting about her appointment, right? She can't be involved in that company, that would look like a conflict of interest! 

So let's just get on with our story.

DeVos is from Michigan. Betsy and her husband, Dick, have funded countless Republican candidates in Michigan, going back to the 1990s.

Nowhere has the family made its presence felt as it has in Michigan, where it has given more than $44 million to the state party, GOP legislative committees, and Republican candidates since 1997. "It's been a generational commitment," Anuzis notes. "I can't start to even think of who would've filled the void without the DeVoses there."

Governor Rick Snyder has been the recipient of the DeVos family's largesse.

Employees of Blue Cross/Blue Shield are the biggest funding source for the governor so far, having donated $112,131. Fifteen members of the DeVos family have contributed $85,600. They are followed by employees of CMS Energy, $82,975, and DTE Energy, $75,800.

The DeVos family uses their money and influence for any number of vile endeavors; vouchers, right-to-work laws, anti-gay marriage efforts, etc. But school choice is Betsy Devos' bread and butter.

But they are perhaps most ardent about their support for Mother Crusader: Betsy DeVos: Conflict of Interest Concerns Arise on Future Secretary's Twitter Account:

Never Thought I Would See This in My Lifetime: Fascism in America | Diane Ravitch's blog

Never Thought I Would See This in My Lifetime: Fascism in America | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Never Thought I Would See This in My Lifetime: Fascism in America 

The New York Times depicted an extraordinary spectacle: the gathering of a group of people wearing swastikas and giving the Nazi salute, convening in a federal office building to celebrate the election of the new President.

They call themselves the “alt-right.” But when people give the “sieg heil” salute, when they babble about the racial inferiority of nonwhites,  when they use German expressions, they are neo-Nazis at best.

Their leader, Richard B. Spencer, spoke in familiar terms:

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. Mr. Spencer called out: “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” and then, “Hail victory!” — the English translation of the Nazi exhortation “Sieg Heil!” The room shouted back…

Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.

The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press….”

“America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.”

“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.

More members of the audience were on their feet as Mr. Spencer described the choice facing white people as to “conquer or die.”

Of other races, Mr. Spencer said: “We don’t exploit other groups, we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around.”

This is America. There is free speech for all, even for the speech we deplore. But let’s get the terminology right. “Alt-right” is a weasel word. Just call them fascists.Never Thought I Would See This in My Lifetime: Fascism in America | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Confederate Battle Flags, Nazi Salutes, and Causes | One Flew East

Confederate Battle Flags, Nazi Salutes, and Causes | One Flew East:

CONFEDERATE BATTLE FLAGS, NAZI SALUTES, AND CAUSES

Are we stuck with the hatred unleashed by Donald Trump’s success? Are we seeing something that has always been there, but repressed, bubbling to the surface?

I don’t think it’s quite so simple. Or as necessarily permanent as it now may seem.

Let me say this at the outset: All four of my great-great-grandfathers on my mother’s side fought for the Confederacy. One was invalided out just months after entering the army, carrying a bullet in his head for the rest of his life. Another was captured during the Union breakthrough at Petersburg, spending the final weeks of the war in a POW camp in Maryland. Another was a cavalry private who probably fought at Gettysburg. I have less information on the fourth: Other than the fact that he entered the army in the middle of 1862, I know little about him. I wish I knew more.

Yet I want nothing to do with the Confederate battle flag. I suspect many of the millions of other descendants feel exactly the same.

Use of the flag today has little to do with a war 150 years past but comes from anger today and a need to strike out, at least symbolically, against perceived oppressors. Similarly, few of those supposed Adolph Hitler fans in America today have much knowledge of him. They don’t care to. Their point has little to do with Nazi Germany but a great deal to do with annoying people they believe are holding them back.

These adopted symbols are used with little concern for history; they are chosen for impact, not meaning. Yes, there’s something infantile in their use, wanting to stir things up for the satisfaction of seeing one’s antagonists agonize. But there’s little real understanding.

Though my father’s family were also Appalachian, they were mostly on the state of Ohio side of that river. Like the West Virginians directly across, they stayed with the Union, my great-grandfather fighting in West Virginia and then in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. None of my other direct ancestors on that side was of an age to fight though, after the war, my great-grandfather and his uncle discovered, at a family gathering, that they had been on opposite sides during a skirmish at Gauley Bridge in West Virginia. They may even have shot at each other, for that particular incident involved only some hundred men (or so family lore has it).

Still, I’ve an excellent Confederate pedigree—even with the fact of divided ancestry. It was a divisive war, that Civil War. Many families had sons, fathers and husbands fighting—and many had some of them on the other side. But families, after the war, made their peace—even if many of the problems that caused the war had only been transformed . During the First World War, both of my grandfathers, one from a fully Confederate family and the other true to the Union, fought willingly for the United States.

In the mid-1920s, my northern grandfather spoke out strongly against the KKK as it tried to organize in Ohio. In 1968, my southern grandfather stated than no one in his family would vote for George Wallace. Yet both of them had grown up in strongly racist and anti-Semitic cultures and both had reflected the attitudes of their time.

But both of them showed that people and cultures can change. Eating with my southern grandfather in a North Carolina café in the furniture-mill town he had lived in for half a century, I watched him recognize the family name on the server’s lapel then ask her if she were related to so-and-so. Young and African-American, she was cold to this elderly white man in a three-piece suit. He was hurt, though he tried to hide it, for he was sure he knew her family. He didn’t understand the extent of the divide the situation represented. Race, age and class (though he had grown up in the rural part of one of the poorest counties in the country at that time, he had prospered) were so entrenched in their relative positions that there was no way a bridge could have been created by simple banter.

Though he was well aware of race and carried racist attitudes to his grave, my grandfather never hated black people and had learned to accept a changing role for African-Americans in the society of the United States. A large part of his prosperity came from treating them honestly as an insurance agent. Actually, he treated allof his customers honestly, making no differentiation based on race. Claims were scrupulously and honestly filled, bringing him more and more clients. He learned Confederate Battle Flags, Nazi Salutes, and Causes | One Flew East:

Tell Your Senator to Vote NO for Betsy DeVos - Network For Public Education

Tell Your Senator to Vote NO for Betsy DeVos - Network For Public Education:

Tell Your Senator to Vote NO for Betsy DeVos

The Network for Public Education is appalled, but not surprised, by Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. DeVos is a long-time advocate for the Trump/Pence education privatization agenda. She, like the Trump/Pence team, favors vouchers that would give public funds to private and religious schools. Her family’s foundation has promoted vouchers in many states. The Trump/Pence/DeVos plan, long supported by the extreme right, would take Title I funds from districts and allow parents to “shop” with those dollars among private schools, charters and online schools. DeVos believes that the market solves all problems, and she and her husband’s foundation spent nearly 1.5 million dollars to persuade the Michigan legislature to kill a bill to regulate charter schools in the state.

Thanks to her efforts, 80% of the charters in Michigan operate for profit, without accountability or transparency.

Send a clear message to the Senate that Betsy DeVos should not be confirmed as U.S. Secretary of Education. Her hostility towards public schools disqualifies her. Send your letter today. We make it easy.

Tell your senator to vote "no" for Betsy DeVos

We must send a clear message to Trump that we will not allow our schools to be privatized.  Send the sample letter we provide or write your own. Tell your Senator to vote "no" for Betsy DeVos.

Tell Your Senator to Vote NO for Betsy DeVos - Network For Public Education:

Stuffing the Public Education Turkey: How’s it going to Turn Out With DeVos as the Cook? – Missouri Education Watchdog

Stuffing the Public Education Turkey: How’s it going to Turn Out With DeVos as the Cook? – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Stuffing the Public Education Turkey: How’s it going to Turn Out With DeVos as the Cook?

If you follow education reform, this Thanksgiving has been, well, interesting.  Twitter comments on the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary have ranged from those celebrating a charter school proponent to those concerned about her apparent 11th hour conversion against Common Core and praise from Jeb Bush:

Many of us are skeptical that she is not a supporter of Common Core as she has not spoken out against it one time during the seven years it was being implemented and as she sat on the Board of Jeb Bush’s organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE).  But hey, if you believe that statement from DeVos on her twitter feed, Stuffing the Public Education Turkey: How’s it going to Turn Out With DeVos as the Cook? – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Audio: New research finds Latino families want preschool as much as others, but big gaps in access remain | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: New research finds Latino families want preschool as much as others, but big gaps in access remain | 89.3 KPCC:

New research finds Latino families want preschool as much as others, but big gaps in access remain

Marissa González is desperate for her 3-year-old to be in preschool.

The Pico Union mother quit her job as a special education teacher when her first child was born because she wanted to be at home with her children in their early years. But as soon as they were old enough, she began applying to nearby preschools. She wants her young son to learn from qualified teachers and play with other children.

“I try, but as a mom what I do at home is different,” González said.

She’s applied unsuccessfully to subsidized preschools in her area – they’re all full. And the family cannot afford private preschool.

González’s older children attended preschool, and she hopes her youngest will get a seat next year.

Her experience mirrors both new research findings and unfortunate urban realities.

RESEARCH FINDS LATINO CHILDREN HAVE HIGH PRESCHOOL PARTICIPATION.

The new research shows that Latino families nationwide are seeking out preschool for their 3- and 4-year-olds. Nationally, two-thirds of all low-income Latino preschoolers attend some form of early education. That's the same as the enrollment of low-income white children, but is less than black low-income preschoolers of whom three-quarters are enrolled.

The new data comes from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families and is based on interviews with over 11,000 families nationwide. One-quarter of those interviewed were Latino families.

The finding that these families are seeking out center-based childcare for their young children goes against some commonly-held conclusions about the early education choices of Latino communities. 

“This disrupts the prevailing idea that [Hispanic] families prefer to keep kids at home or don’t like center care and prefer family based care,” said to Michael López, a principal investigator at the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families.

The reports also found that low-income Latino children spend an average of 30 hours per week in some form of early education. Black children spend a similar amount of time in preschool, but white children attend for fewer hours per week.

According to researchers, this is all good news for closing the achievement gap between Hispanic students and their peers.

But the data also show that when it comes to Latino babies and toddlers, only one in three are in a formal care arrangement, far fewer than their black and white peers.

Lina Guzman, director of Child Trends Hispanic Institute and co-author of the new reports, said this might be due to a “potential mismatch between when parents are working and when centers are open.”

The report found that among Hispanic children, one-third are in care during Audio: New research finds Latino families want preschool as much as others, but big gaps in access remain | 89.3 KPCC:

“Out of Time” in Post-Truth Trumplandia | the becoming radical

“Out of Time” in Post-Truth Trumplandia | the becoming radical:

“Out of Time” in Post-Truth Trumplandia

We’ve been through fake-a-breakdown
Self-hurt, plastics, collections
Self-help, self-pain
EST, psychics, fuck all

“Country Feedback,” R.E.M.

Maybe this is the stuff of Legend, or false memory—or that the Russians can hack even that—but it seems R.E.M. kept a running list of possible album titles as they recorded, a practice often including daring titles left to linger with the specter of a very unlike-R.E.M. outcome.

For the now 25-year-old Out of Time, that title, I recall, came from a final statement on that board—the band was out of time for submitting the recordings and title.

That the album most associated with R.E.M. and their delayed rise to pop culture fame, fueled as well by their becoming MTV darlings, has turned 25 in the year of electing Trump seems cruelly painful, and whether or not my recollection about how the album was named is factual has become irrelevant in post-truth Trumplandia.

Throughout the 1980s, R.E.M. was immediately loved by Rolling Stone and the so-called college radio crowd, and they were a touring alternative rock success—a reality that had much to do with fans and music critics recognizing that within the realm of popular music, R.E.M. took their craft seriously and were uniquely adept at that craft.

By the time the band angered those 1980s alternative fans by signing a huge record contract with Warner Brothers, and then (gasp) achieved fame with “Losing My Religion,” R.E.M. had become known as both a highly ethical band (making money but not selling out their artistic autonomy) and a political band; neither seemed to hurt the band in ways that other performers could not avoid (think many years later the fate of the Dixie Chicks).

Still now after the band has called it a day, after their fame dwindled into petty sniping at the albums produced after Bill Berry retired (Up, Reveal and Around the Sun unfairly slighted by critics and fans), after the inevitable rush to reconsider the enduring excellence once R.E.M. no longer was a practicing band—it is the politics of R.E.M. that fascinates me, from the more overtly political “Orange Crush” and “Ignoreland” to the ambiguously political “Fall on Me” or intimacy politics of “Tongue.”

Yes, Out of Time soared into the wider national and international consciousness with “Losing My Religion” as the least likely of hits (dare we say radio hit in the context of the album’s first song and the fact that this world is now a distant memory?) and an iconic tour-de-force in music videos.

But appreciating an album also requires taking the album as a whole:

Out of Time
01. Radio Song
02. Losing My Religion
03. Low
04. Near Wild Heaven
05. Endgame
06. Shiny Happy People
07. Belong
08. Half A World Away
09. Texarkana
10. Country Feedback
11. Me In Honey

The paradox of R.E.M., for me, is that the popularity of the band includes “Losing My Religion” and the odd controversy over the so-called too-poppy “Shiny Happy People”—and maybe that the album has guest vocals from KRS-One and Kate Pierson of the B-52s—but that many among those wider, late-to-the-party fans don’t understand: “I’m not sure all these people understand,” Stipe sings in the haunting and magnificent “Out of Time” in Post-Truth Trumplandia | the becoming radical:

glen brown: A Letter on Behalf of Human Rights to President-elect Trump by Kenneth Roth

glen brown: A Letter on Behalf of Human Rights to President-elect Trump by Kenneth Roth:

A Letter on Behalf of Human Rights to President-elect Trump by Kenneth Roth

November 23, 2016

Donald Trump

President-elect of the United States of America

Trump Tower

735 5^th Avenue

New York, NY 10022

Dear President-elect Trump:

I write to you on behalf of Human Rights Watch to urge you to repudiate and rescind pledges and policy proposals you made in the course of the presidential election campaign that if implemented by your administration would violate fundamental human rights and be deeply damaging to millions of people in the United States and abroad.

While you have recently stepped back from some of these proposals, suggesting that certain campaign promises were merely ideas or opening bids in a negotiation, none has been clearly and unequivocally retracted. In particular, statements that indicate backtracking from US human rights commitments and the rule of law threaten the well-being of people within the United States and US standing in the world. Even leaving positions on issues ambiguous can have a lasting corrosive effect.

Accordingly, we believe it imperative that you explicitly retract the following proposals that would violate or threaten core human rights under US law or the international legal obligations of the United States.

Reinstating Torture and Targeting Civilians

Torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment violates US law, including the federal torture statute and the War Crimes Act. It also violates long-recognized protections under the laws of war, including the 1949 Geneva Conventions. 

Reinstating any sort of interrogation program that involves torture, including waterboarding, or ill-treatment will expose senior administration officials and US military personnel to criminal liability within the US and abroad. Any legal opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel or other department attempting to justify torture will be legally void. It will put legal counsel involved at risk of liability for conspiracy or related charges, and it will not serve to protect anyone purporting to rely on such an opinion that would so clearly not have been rendered in good faith. 

You recently suggested that after speaking with military leaders, you have come to realize that torture might not be as effective as you had previously thought. This is an important acknowledgment but you should state unequivocally that your glen brown: A Letter on Behalf of Human Rights to President-elect Trump by Kenneth Roth:

FLASHBACK: Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan's Plan to Defund the Left | Mother Jones

Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan's Plan to Defund the Left | Mother Jones:

Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan's Plan to Defund the Left

They beat Big Labor in its own backyard. Next up: your state?

IN THE PREDAWN TWILIGHT of December 4, 2012, Randy Richardville, the Republican majority leader of the Michigan Senate, called an old friend to deliver some grim news. Richardville's two-hour commute to the state capitol in Lansing gave him plenty of time to check in with friends, staff, and colleagues, who were accustomed to his early morning calls. None more so than Mike Jackson.

Jackson and Richardville had grown up in the auto town of Monroe, 40 miles south of Detroit. Jackson now headed Michigan's 14,000-member carpenters and millwrights' union, which had endorsed Richardville, a moderate Republican, for 10 of the 12 years he'd served in the state Legislature.

"Guess where I was last night," Richardville said.

Graphic: The Devos Family's Giving Tree

Jackson wasn't in a guessing mood—and it wasn't just the early hour. Since the election a few weeks earlier, Republicans had been aiming to use the current lame-duck session to ram through a controversial piece of legislation known as right-to-work. Such laws, already on the books in 23 states, outlawed contracts requiring all employees in a unionized workplace to pay dues for union representation. Jackson and other labor leaders were scrambling to head off the bill, widely regarded as a disaster for unions. Richardville, who had once told a hotel conference room filled with union members that right-to-work would pass "over my dead body," was one of the votes they'd counted on.

Richardville said he'd spent the previous evening at a fundraiser in western Michigan. At one point during the event, he was escorted into a private room where a dozen wealthy business moguls were waiting for him. Some he recognized as heavy hitters in Michigan politics; others had flown in from out of state.

One of the men in the room glared at Richardville. "You gotta grow a set and move this legislation," the man said, referring to right-to-work. Had he ever run for office? Richardville asked. The man said no. "Well, when you grow a set and give that a try," Richardville snapped, "then you can talk about the size of my testicles."

Jackson was wide awake now. "Good for you," he said. "How'd it end?"

"Mike, you're fucked," Richardville said. "They've got all the money they need, they're going up on the air, and they're going to push this freedom-to-work thing."

Wasn't there some way to head off the bill? Jackson asked. "They've got my caucus," Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan's Plan to Defund the Left | Mother Jones: